1. Introduction

As a comprehensive technology, industrial automation is a general term for information processing and process control of measurement, manipulation, etc., without direct manual intervention, according to expected aim in machine equipment or production process. Through the application of computer, electronic equipment, control theory, and related process technologies, industrial automation produces the management functions of optimization, detection, control, and regulation of the whole industrial production process to realize the established objectives, achieving industrial production increase, energy saving, consumption reduction, and safe production.

The foundation of intelligent manufacturing is digitalization, networking, and integration. Correspondingly, industrial automation in the era of intelligence will transform centralized control into decentralized enhanced control under the original automation technology and architecture, so that the communication between sensors and the Internet can be seamlessly docked, establishing a highly flexible, personalized, and digital production mode that integrates products and services. In this mode, production automation technology can make equipment more intelligent through self-diagnosis, self-correction, and various functional software to better assist workers to complete production. Therefore, the communication and integration capabilities of automation equipment are required to be stronger, while the automation software needs to have a stronger ability of analysis and processing and data sharing with other software systems of enterprises.

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and eproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2019 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
